THE RIGHT TO IGNITE

Tim Blair

–,
Sunday,
June,
15,
2008,(3:29am)

If someone of her political pedigree, with her 100 per cent name recognition, her ability to raise millions and her finely honed and popular political message can’t win the nomination, what chance does a woman have who has none of these advantages? That glass ceiling is going to be there for a long time yet.

That ainâ€™t the half of it, Anne. In an even worse case of glass ceilingism, sexist al Qaeda bosses are denying women the right to blow themselves up:

Ayman Al-Zawahri said in April that the terrorist group does not have women. A woman’s role, he said on the Internet audio recording, is limited to caring for the homes and children of al-Qaida fighters.

His remarks have since prompted an outcry from fundamentalist women, who are fighting or pleading for the right to be terrorists.

Which is what she wants anyway. Women; theyâ€™re so confusing. Some Semtex sisters are boldly forging ahead, Al-Zawahri be damned:

“Women were very disappointed because what al-Zawahri said is not what’s happening today in the Middle East, especially in Iraq or in Palestinian groups,” said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors militant Web sites. “Suicide operations are being carried out by women, who play an important role in jihad.”

Glass ceilings donâ€™t last too long around these chicks with wicks. Nor do walls, windows, doors or other building structures. Or the women themselves.

In the Iraq branch, for example, women have carried out or attempted at least 20 suicide bombings since 2003. Al-Qaida members suspected of training women to use suicide belts were captured in Iraq at least three times last year ...

Progress!

Hamas, another militant group, is open about using women fighters and disagrees with al-Qaida’s stated stance. At least 11 Palestinian women have launched suicide attacks in recent years.

“A lot of the girls I speak to ... want to carry weapons. They live with this great frustration and oppression,” said Huda Naim, a prominent women’s leader, Hamas member and Palestinian lawmaker in Gaza. “We don’t have a special militant wing for women ... but that doesn’t mean that we strip women of the right to go to jihad.”

Wear a sack all your life then explode. Why, itâ€™s a win/win. The following paragraph - this is all from the Associated Press, by the way - is jaw-dropping:

Al-Zawahri’s remarks show the fine line al-Qaida walks in terms of public relations. In a modern Arab world where women work even in some conservative countries, al-Qaida’s attitude could hurt its efforts to win over the public at large.

As opposing to actually hurting and killing the public at large, which is what suicide bombers tend to do. Apparently that isnâ€™t considered as much of a PR gaffe. Poor old Al-Zawahri is struggling to pacify the exploding Islamofeminist movement:

“I say to you ... (I have) tasted the bitterness of American brutality: my favorite wife’s chest was crushed by a concrete ceiling,” he wrote in a 2005 letter.

I still maintain that these jihadi women are so eager to blow themselves up because that’s the only way they can get out of being married to some hairy goat farmer twice their age who comes home to beat them after the weekly rant at the mosque.

A while back I saw some pictures online of iraqi policewomen qualifying with their sidearms—in burqas.

It occurred to me then that sooner rather than later one of those women is going to look from the black burlap sack she’s wearing in 130 degree heat to the loaded gun in her hand and have a breakthrough.

Maybe we should be airdropping copies of Paxton Quigley’s books all over the MidEast…

“If someone of her political pedigree, with her 100 per cent name recognition, her ability to raise millions and her finely honed and popular political message canâ€™t win the nomination, what chance does a woman have who has none of these advantages? That glass ceiling is going to be there for a long time yet.”

Hah! Just about the same chance a man with none of those advantages has!

I sympathize with the ladies. They wish to do something good for humanity, and I say they should be able to do it. After all, a healthy gene pool being vital for the future of Humanity, the right of anybody to remove personally deficient DNA therefrom should not be infringed.

Putting aside the insanity of Muslim women demanding their right to be suicide bombers, it would be deliciously ironic if that led to more rights for them in other areas. Even better, what if they decide to suicide bomb for more rights?

Yeah, those are both very long shots, more like wishful thinking. But who the heck knows for sure how things will turn out?

Bet the “chicks with wick’s” (love it!) won’t ever be mentioned in any programming prepared by Our (hah!) ABC, just as it never mentioned David Hicks’ similar ideas about women (I suspect it’s one of the Sydney Collective who’s adopted him). Our ABC will most likely think the right to blow oneself up demonstrates huge strides in the advancement of women.

Seriously, one thing that does concern me is what Bruce Bawer - link - calls “creeping sharia”. He argues that ‘people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions.

He points out that the entertainment industry is another that does its best to undermine Western values, either tiptoeing around fundamentalist Islam or whitewashing it. Two examples he mentioned were the Canadian Broadcasting Corporationâ€™s Little Mosque on the Prairie and CWâ€™s Aliens in America. Both shows, he rightly says, take it for granted that thereâ€™s no fundamentalist Islam problem in the West, but only an anti-Islam problem. One could cite the Oz example of the SBS programme Salam Cafe where sweet Muslim women with real Aussie accents must constantly deal with bumptious, biased, anyone-else-but-Muslim, Australians.

He also points out that even in Norway, held up so often as an example to us all, its most celebrated lawyer argued that the punishment for honour killing should be less than for other murders because itâ€™s arrogant for the West to expect Muslim men to conform to our societyâ€™s norms - and a cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responding to high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo exhorted women to realise that they lived in a multicultural society and should adapt themselves to it!

Sorry, Tim. This is perhaps serious stuff for a Sunday morning, but while I enjoyed very much reading your piece which made me laugh, it also made me sad. It seems it might be up to women living in the Islamic world to hoist themselves out of and away from mindsets that offer them the liberty to kill themselves and others but donâ€™t offer them much else in the way of freedom.

However, in the past few days I was encouraged by the report of the 10-year-old girl in Yemen who demanded and got a divorce from an abusive husband after appeals to her father failed. link

Letâ€™s hope thereâ€™s no repercussions and sheâ€™s not punished and ostracised for her stance. But if a 10-year-old can do it, others can too.

Ann the story is much more disturbing than the sentimentalised LAT report in the SMH.

When I reported that story from Yemen on my blog, my main source was the Yemen Times, which said the girl was - even more disturbing - EIGHT - when she was forcibly married. The father was released, and the husband refused to divorce her - he was effectively bribed and the marriage ‘terminated’ so that he could not remarry her.

Child marriages (read: child rape) are common place in parts of Yemen and the Yemeni government had knocked back legislation to up the age of marriage as “unislamic” (why not, Mohammed took an 8 year old - Aisha - as his wife). I remember reading a Morroccan blog - in French - where the blogger and commenters were rightfully outraged at the barbarity of child marriages. I pointed out to them that the Yemenis thought it was a perfectly ‘islamic’ thing to do, and asked if it was because of Mohammed’s example etc. and why it is important for young Muslims to find a way to push for reform. My comment was not published. I don’t think it was because of my bad French.

Barrie beat me to this, but it’s worth repeating: wonderful how Anne Summers can blind herself to the fact that the only reason Hillary is anywhere near a presidential primary is because of who she married. Without Bill, she’d still be shaking down hapless rubes in Arkansas.

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